The 10 Least Competent Time Travelers
Posted at 5:04 AM Oct 14, 2008
By Caleb Goellner
Time travel ain't easy. If it were, everybody would be doing it. With all the paradoxes to avoid and all of the conflicting theories on just what can and cannot be altered, it's best for nerds to look past the present and into the future when it comes to their escapist fiction of choice. Guys like The Doctor and Bill and Ted's buddy Rufus make it look simple, but the very notion of traveling to another time period without undoing reality is worth a nod in itself, really. So, rather than list the most chrono-challenged voyagers, let's look at those who are simply the least good.
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10) Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Rocky and Bullwinkle
The stars of the far superior half of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Mr. Peabody and his adopted son Sherman helped mend frayed elements of the past to ensure historical accuracy. Or did they? Never mind that the principle of this show defies science, these two essentially acted as fascists! Think about it. They used their WABAC machine to shape the past how it was "supposed" to happen (i.e. however they damn well saw fit). Not content to simply shape history, Mr. Peabody was diabolical enough to summarize his efforts with bad puns and broadcast them to the world. This tyranny continued for nearly 100 segments before time was seemingly restored. We can only assume Doctor Who stopped the despots or that they were killed in a collision with Bill and Ted's phone booth.
9) Cable and Bishop, X-Men
Because X-Men comics require copious amounts of confusion to function properly, they have not one, but two gun-toting heroes sent to the present from bleak futures! The son of Cyclops and Jean Grey (or is it a clone of Jean? Or is it Phoenix? Maybe Jean's ghost?), Cable hails from a world ravaged by the villain Apocalypse and get this, he's the only one who can stop this future from coming to pass! Bishop comes from a future where mankind is at war with mutants and sentinels are everywhere and, yep, he too is the only one who can stop this nightmare from coming to pass! Since their debuts, neither character seems to have succeeded in preventing much of anything. With every passing crossover, this fact is usually blamed on chronal flux, shifting timelines, wearing too many damn pouches and other anomalies. Excuses, excuses.
8) Philip J. Fry, Futurama
Fry's slacker status is the precursor for nearly every accidental thing that happens to him. He traveled to the future via suspended animation. Once there, the first thing he does is surround himself with the delightful misfits at the Planet Express. Given the gross incompetency of the entire Planet Express crew, it's no wonder Fry would eventually succeed in traveling to the past several times. In what is perhaps his biggest time snafu, Fry travels to the year 1947 where he accidentally kills his grandfather and um…gets to know his grandmother. Like biblically. There's a lame song out there about becoming your own grandpa, but Fry actually achieved this unholy anomaly.
7) Gosalyn, Darkwing Duck
Darkwing Duck's daughter Gosalyn was a rather impetuous girl whose crime fighting exploits provided the "Terror that Flapped in the Night," with undo stress. After all, she usually succeeded in helping DD during his more clueless moments. However, Gosalyn's impulsive streak eventually landed her in an escaping villain's malfunctioning time machine. She arrives in a future inspired by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns where a psychotic DarkWarrior Duck rules St. Canard with an iron fist. Awesome, right? Problem is, Gosalyn successfully navigated her way back to the past, preventing a substantially cooler future from occurring.
6) Doc Brown, Back to the Future
The inventor of several time machines, and a buyer of black market uranium, Doc Brown should have been the star of Back to the Future. Sadly, with his youth behind him, Doc became something of a mad scientist. He had the flux-capacity to build his own working time machine, just no pizzazz. That's why teenage novice Marty McFly constantly showed him up and saved the day. It also didn't hurt that Marty usually had Huey Lewis blaring in the background of his life and Doc Brown had to settle for orchestrated motifs. To his credit, Doc gets Marty out of a few scrapes in the Back to the Future trilogy, but his dementia ultimately catches up with him in the animated series that followed. Seriously. He let's his dog drive his "Time Train." Ugh.
Comments
The Terminator is a T-800, not a T-1.
Other than that, good list.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 05:51:59 AMYou missed the little pink rubber piggy in Invader Zim that makes Dib endlessly powerful... I loveded your piggy... :*0
Posted 10/14/2008 at 05:55:28 AMExcellent list! Although you missed Captain (pause) James (pause) T. (pause) Kirk.
How many time-traveling adventures for (pause) him? And yet he meets his untimely end because he wanted to fistfight a guy with a gun.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 06:12:44 AMThe whole time I was reading the list I kept hope hope hope hoping to see Woody Allen in Sleeper on there! How many other time travelers had to flee from a gigantic inflated breast? And not two, mind you, but a single, gigantic boob.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 07:08:19 AMThe DeLorean was powered by Plutonium, not Uranium. The Libyans!
Posted 10/14/2008 at 07:10:11 AMI can't believe - that with the current hate-on for Heroes - that neither Peter Petrelli or Hiro Nakamura made this list.
Apart from Fry becoming his own grandfather, nobody on this list managed to screw up quite as much as...
Hiro, who went back in time to became his own boyhood hero, inspired an impulsive drunk to become a world-destroying madman, lost true love TWICE and - most recently - killed his best friend after seeing a future where said friend killed him. Never occurred to him that maybe the reason his best friend turned on him might have something to do with ... you know.... treating him like crap up until the point that he killed him.
Peter, who lost his girlfriend in an alternate future and spent the better part of Season 3 screwing around with the time-line to the point that the precognitive people don't know WHAT the heck is going on.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 07:32:52 AMFRY: "Yep, I did the nasty in the past-y!"
Posted 10/14/2008 at 08:22:39 AMCable eventually killed Apocalypse as he was destined to but now he's reduced to a time-hopping babysitter who can only go forward in time. Bishop accidentally arrived in the past chasing down criminals from his timeline but he still failed to stop the future he came from. On the other hand, Bishop's done more time-hopping lately than Cable..hop back to the past to keep Xavier's son from killing Magneto or Xavier...accidentally sent to the future for his own miniseries and now he's jumped to Cable's series to assasinate the baby Cable's sittin to once again "prevent his futre from coming to be"..guy's like a broken record
Posted 10/14/2008 at 08:54:05 AMCaleb, nice list!
I missed the robot list you did earlier...but this one is simultaneously informative and humorous. My jocularity processors are fully activated and i'm experiencing several laugh-cycles from taking in this piece of pop culture journalism.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 10:00:04 AMWhat about Bill & Ted, they're incompetent on their own and are traveling the time circuits in a phone booth! A phone booth I say!
Posted 10/14/2008 at 10:06:32 AMWhat no Sam Becket from Quantum Leap? Jumping from body to body with no idea of where or when you're going.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 11:14:48 AMNot that it matters, but... that is not Cable in the picture, it's Stryfe posing as Cable.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 11:17:39 AMAs mentioned before, Cable actually did kill Apocalypse ... as a teenage boy in the far future! However he has no recollection of it, so he probably thinks he still has to fulfill some bonehead prophecy.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 11:24:50 AMNomination for the movie Timecop, which had many flaws?
Posted 10/14/2008 at 11:30:35 AMNo Captain Braxton from Voyager?
Posted 10/14/2008 at 11:32:13 AMYour right comic nerd, it doesn't matter.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 11:32:14 AMYou forgot Colonel Taylor from the Planet of the Apes. Here's a guy who is on an earth-like planet with obvious although primitive humans and apes that talk ENGLISH. This is a mystery?
Posted 10/14/2008 at 11:53:48 AMbill and ted didn't make the list? lame
Posted 10/14/2008 at 12:27:17 PMBill & Ted didn't screw anything up - they made it better.
Homer Simpson has to be the worst. He actually achieved the perfect future and blew it because he didn't see donuts. "It's raining again" says Marge as donuts fall from the sky...
Posted 10/14/2008 at 12:48:16 PMSherman was Mr. Peabody's pet boy, not his adopted son.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 01:01:42 PMWhat about Invader Zim? Remember that episode with the pigs? That's like, the QUINTESSENTIAL incompetant time-travel story.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 01:20:08 PMAre you kidding? Dr. Doom? I tell you if I had a time machine, the first thing i would do is go pick up chicks from the past and learn magic... hellz yeah!
Posted 10/14/2008 at 01:37:04 PMFun list. But the larger point is that no time traveler can be competent, since time travel is so overwhelming paradoxical.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 02:44:53 PMI gotta "third" the Invader Zim story.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 03:57:58 PMGreat list. I have to agree with you.
Posted 10/14/2008 at 04:39:19 PMSadly, I have to agree with the Hiro/Peter of Heroes fame. They've done so many stupid things that you almost want to travel back in time and abort them from their mothers.
And Zap, I wouldn't call Sam Beckett incompetent. He was always changing things for good, from leap to leap. Sure, he never got home...but hey, everybody else's lives were better!
Posted 10/14/2008 at 04:48:11 PMHow about Dr. Who? Did he ever get to where he intended to go? Did he not leave chaos and destruction in his wake?
Posted 10/14/2008 at 04:58:25 PMGalvaTRION> Actually, it seems the Arnold-model Terminators have a ton of numeric designations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-101
...but I don't think the T-1 was one of them.
--LBD "Nytetrayn"
Posted 10/14/2008 at 08:20:19 PMOn the TV show Get a Life, Chris made a time traveling drink. One of the ingredients was thyme. Also, Chris was an idiot.
Posted 10/15/2008 at 12:02:43 AMwhat about the prince of persia trilogy? ok its a game but he did manage to make all his friends go to dust, then he had to run from a monster that wanted to turn him into poo and finally he had to clear an entire city full of evil sand monsters with a cool blue knife. doesn't that count as one of the most f**ked up stories in (fiction)history?
Posted 10/15/2008 at 03:56:24 AMWas Peter Griffin traveling back x10 too recent for this list? "Heh, heh, heh, heh-heh, heh, and then another heh, heh, heh-heh, heh..."
Also, I don't watch Futurama enough to have seen that episode, thanks so much for the warning. Friggin' EW.
Posted 10/16/2008 at 11:08:15 AM